FontAsset  - AS3 Flex

Package	mx.core
Class	public class FontAsset
Inheritance	FontAsset Font Object
Implements	IFlexAsset

Language Version:

ActionScript 3.0

Product Version:

Flex 3

Runtime Versions:

Flash Player 9, AIR 1.1

FontAsset is a subclass of the flash.text.Font class which represents fonts that you embed in a Flex application.

The font that you embed can be TrueType (TTF) or OpenType (OTF). You can also embed a system font or a font that is in a SWF file produced by Flash. In each of these cases, the MXML compiler autogenerates a class that extends FontAsset to represent the embedded font.

You do not generally use the FontAsset class directly when you write a Flex application. For example, you can embed a font by using the font-face CSS selector without having to understand that the MXML compiler has created a subclass of FontAsset for you.

However, it might be useful to understand what is happening at the ActionScript level. To embed a font in ActionScript, you declare a variable of type Class, and put [Embed] metadata on it. For example, you embed a TTF file like this:

  [Embed(source="Fancy.ttf", fontName="Fancy")] 
  var fancyClass:Class;
  

The MXML compiler transcodes the TTF data into the font format that the player uses, autogenerates a subclass of the FontAsset class, and sets your variable to be a reference to this autogenerated class. You can then use this class reference to create instances of the FontAsset by using the new operator, and you can use APIs of the Font class on them; for example:

  var fancyFont:FontAsset = FontAsset(new fancyClass());
  var hasDigits:Boolean = fancyFont.hasGlyphs("0123456789");
  

However, you rarely need to create FontAsset instances yourself because you use the fontName that you specify in the [Embed] metadata to refer to the font; for example, you set the fontFamily CSS style to the font name (in this example, "Fancy"), and not to a FontAsset instance such as fancyFont or to the fancyClass class reference. For example:

  <mx:Label text="Thank you for your order." fontFamily="Fancy"/>
  

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